Climate change

In today's PMQs, Ming Campbell asked the PM, with specific reference to the recent floods the following question:

"The Prime Minister was responsible for the establishment of the Stern report which as he will recall pointed out the severe economic consequences of climate change. Isn't it clear from the events of the past few weeks that we can not afford not to take the necessary steps nor indeed not to spend the necessary money in order to mitigate the effects of climate change."

To which Gordon Brown answered:

Most of the papers have been responsible enough not to attribute the latest bad weather to climate-change, but guess which one is the exception? The Independent's lead story today is titled "After the deluge - scientists confirm global warming link to increased rain". They have got hold of a report that won't be published until Wednesday, which they claim "supports the idea [that recent weather is caused by climate-change], by showing that in recent decades rainfall has increased over several areas of the world..." These claims are repeated at several points in the article, always carefully phrased to refer to Britain (or even wider regions) as a whole and to avoid consideration of seasonal patterns. For example: "The computer models used to predict the future course of global warming all show heavier rainfall, and indeed 'extreme rainfall events', as one of its principle consequences".

I have sent the following letter in response, which they won't publish, of course, because dissent from their version of climate-change dogma is not permissible:

Sir, Can you point to any climate models, including the one to be published on Wednesday, that predict increased rainfall in England in summer? All climate models of which I am aware predict reduced rainfall in England in summer. Any increase in rainfall is either for winter or an annual average, where the winter increase outweighs the summer decrease. Your opportunistic distortion of climate-change science to suit the story you want to tell undermines the credibility of that science.

-- Yours, etc

As those who have read my posts on this issue will know, I am not an arch-sceptic of anthropogenic global-warming theory (I accept that there is a risk that we ought to take into account), but I do despise prejudice portrayed as hard scientific fact.

The Government thinks that we should be using energy more efficiently. They are right. So guess which sector increased its consumption of electricity the most in Europe between 1999 and 2004. Industry? Households? No, it was the "tertiary sector" - in other words, government, state-funded services, the voluntary sector and commerce.

Industrial consumption was up by 9.5%, domestic by 10.8%, and the tertiary sector by a wapping 15.6%. Were our leaders and bureaucrats getting more wasteful, or were there just more of them? Or both?

If you find ways to save energy in your business, profits are increased and your career or business should prosper. If you find ways to save energy at home, you save money to spend on other things. If you work for the government and you find ways to save energy....you save other people (taxpayers) some money, and your budget gets cut. I wonder why government has been least successful?

So it turns out that the car is more environmentally friendly than the train for a family of three or more.  That's one in the eye for enviro-nutters.  It is also one in the eye for this government's completely muddled and irrational environmental and transport policies.  As for the spiralling cost of rail transport... Which reminds me, I have to catch a South West Train today, nothing could fill me with more dread.  And now it turns out I'd better off in the comfort of a car.

I love it when a story like this comes along. Partly because it really upsets all the enviro-scaremongerers who seem happier to hear that the world is doomed rather than hear some balance to the debate. It turns out that cows and sheep and doing more damage to the environment than 4x4s or "Chelsea Tractors". Actually, this isn't new news at all, but the green nutters wouldn't want anyone to know this, because Chelsea tractors are evil.

The carrot or the stick?  Tax or tax relief?  Which is the best way to tackle climate change?  Well, not surprisingly, business would rather take the carrot.  So much so, in fact, that a report by Pricewaterhouse Coopers suggests that the current disjointed array of government policies aimed at tackling carbon emissions are simply ineffective.  A massive 71% of industry respondents to the scheme claimed that their behaviour had been changed.  But almost half said that Government policy and economic instruments - taxes, duties, the climate-change levy and investment allowances - are "no

The claims that this summer's unseasonal weather are the result of global warming continue. Whether you believe that global warming is the result of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions, like the majority, or of permissive attitudes to gay relationships, like the Bishop of Carlisle, you are supposed to believe that the recent floods are nature or God's judgment on our wicked ways.

Contrary to earlier claims, the Met. Office have started to whisper that this weather is not, in fact, the result of global warming, but is more likely caused by the impacts of a La Niña weather system. If so, it also gives the lie to the claims that this weather was unpredictable. It wasn't, it was just unpredicted by the "experts" to whom the government and the media listen.

Let's be clear. No one who knew anything about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory should ever have been claiming that heavy summer rainfall was the result of AGW. Below is a graph produced by the Governments' UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) in cooperation with DEFRA, the Met. Office's Hadley Centre, and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, showing predicted changes in precipitation under two climate-change scenarios (Top row = Low emissions, Bottom row = High emissions). It is missing one vital piece of information, which is what each column portrays. The three columns for each block (Winter and Summer) are predictions for how the precipitation will have changed, respectively (left to right) by the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s. As you can see, even under low-emissions scenarios, by the 2020s, summer precipitation is expected to have fallen by upto 20% in most of England, including most of the flood-hit areas. Heavy rainfall that delivers in the space of a few days an amount of rain equal to the total rainfall in an average summer is ABSOLUTELY INCONSISTENT with this, however much pundits might like to claim airily that the models predict more extremes.

In what follows, I want to strike the right balance. I am not a sceptic of the anthropogenic global-warming (AGW) theory, in the sense of one who says that man definitely has no measurable impact on the climate. We ought to take account of the risk and continue to try to understand it. But neither am I an alarmist who is convinced that the science is done and dusted. I think we also ought to take account of alternative (or complementary) theories of why our climate is changing. What I say below does not mean that I have now joined the ranks of those sceptics. It is a criticism of the worst kind of credulous, proselytizing alarmist. It says, we should represent the facts accurately, and keep our eyes and our minds open to all possibilities.

A reporter on BBC Radio 5Live has just said something like "Of course, no one could have forecast the recent downpours, but experts say that extreme weather events like this will become more common if climate-change theories are correct." This was echoed by that other peddler of received wisdom, The Independent. Michael McCarty writes:

"Even though yesterday's remarkable downpours seem very much out of the ordinary, no scientist is going to say that in themselves they prove the climate is changing. There have always been floods; there have always been severe floods. The natural variability of the climate has always included extremes. However, if the predictions of supercomputer climate models are correct, rain of the unusual intensity experienced in many places yesterday is going to become a much more commonplace feature of the weather in Britain as the century progresses."

A couple of problems:

1. Every AGW model forecasts lower rainfall in England in summers. It is in winters that rainfall (and therefore flooding) is expected to increase. This event is contrary to the models, not evidence of them.
2. Someone did predict the downpours. His name is Piers Corbyn. His company is WeatherAction Long-Range Forecasters. He forecast on the 30th May the downpours of both the 12-14th and the 24-26th June. In the case of the 12-14th, he forecast the downpours six months previously. Piers is an astrophysicist, and a leading AGW sceptic, whose weather-forecasting models are based on the same principles that lead him to contest the AGW theories. I have asked him for permission to publish his 30th May forecast, and will put them up on this site if he agrees.

This is not probitive. But it is illustrative. The attempts by the AGW alarmists to shoehorn, by implication and innuendo, the recent events into their view of the world was entirely predictable. And thoroughly dishonest.

UPDATE: Piers has allowed me to make his 30th May forecast available. I have attached the Acrobat file (PDF) containing the detailed forecast to this post (click "Read more" if you are viewing this from the home page and can't see the link), and have copied the relevant parts of his accompanying email in the Comment below.

Keen readers of Picking Losers will know that I am not likely to become a fully paid up member of the Green lobby any time soon.  I do believe that we have a duty to look after the environment and that it is a duty we have neglected in the past.  However, much of the nonsense our politicians and members of the green lobby come out with are simply unbalanced opinions portrayed as fact; often with the intention of getting more money out the tax payer or pushing through a potentially unpopular policy packaged as a green measure.  Fuel tax is one of these areas.

First Bush. Now Blair. What is happening to the world?

Actually, the feigned surprise could be considered disingenuous. This author does not generally perceive politicians as knaves or fools. Mostly, they are decent and intelligent people trying to do what they think is best. Of course there is sometimes corruption and incompetence, but most of the many failings of government can be attributed not to individual failings but to the intellectual climate, both in shaping politicians' false conceptions of appropriate ends and means, and (perhaps more importantly) in shaping the public perceptions that they have to satisfy. What is surprising is not that these people have shown their intelligence, but that they have used that intelligence to reach unpopular and unconventional conclusions, and moreover that they have felt able to go public with them. What a pity that politicians with the freedom of not seeking re-election are not reported more often.

(It is this, by the way, and not whether you agree with what he did, that makes Blair's valedictory excuse - "I did what I thought was right" - so feeble and irrelevant. It is outcomes and not intentions that count.)

Anyway, what Mr Blair is right about is a decent chunk of his analysis of the role and behaviour of the modern media. Not in the regulatory solution at which (as so often) he hints. But in his assessment that there is a problem.

The media have said sayonara to subtlety, dispensed with detail, kissed goodbye to considered analysis. Everything must be immediate and black-and-white. In echoes of Hollywood, there must be "good guys" and "bad guys", a very simple plot, and two-dimensional characterization.

Shock tactics to get your attention. I know it sounds unlikely. But really, he is.

He is calling for a "new framework" to replace the Kyoto Treaty (which comes to an end in 2012). David Miliband helpfully clarified on Radio 4's The World Tonight, that he didn't really mean it in the sense of a replacement for Kyoto, because he had acknowledged that the new framework would also be under the auspices of the UN. I'm sorry David - you might want to look for signs of continuity, but in no sense does this imply the continuation of Kyoto, any more than your second wife would imply continuation of your first marriage, just because you are still living in the same house.

What Bush means, in particular, is that any replacement for Kyoto must not be based on the failed cap-and-trade approach, as embodied in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS). And it is this that he is right about. Cap-and-trade is the wrong approach, in principle and in practice. What follows is a long and technical paper I have prepared (PDF version here) explaining why it is wrong, but let me first summarise it for those of you who have got better things to do with your time.

1. The reasons why Phase 1 failed have not gone away. The EU-ETS is failing to deliver sufficient savings from the sectors and countries covered by it to make their contribution to a target which, if achieved, might reduce temperatures by 0.06°C relative to what it would otherwise have been in 2050.
2. Is it anyway possible to devise a rational basis for allocating emissions-rights? Looking at the current allocations, there is (presumably) method to these allocations, but not logic. This is a central-planner's wet-dream, and a libertarian's worst nightmare.
3. One of the problems with the EU-ETS is its failure to deliver long-term price signals. It is typical hubris of politicians to imagine that they can reduce this uncertainty by declaring their intentions for a time when they will almost certainly not be in power, and for a market over which they have only partial control. It is likely that not even increased federalism would be sufficient to deliver greater certainty, and only a Napoleonic solution would suffice.
4. Even if the EU-ETS could be made to work efficiently, fairly and on a long-term basis, it would disadvantage European nations for as long as other nations did not impose similar costs of carbon on themselves. We will be suckers in a rigged global market for hot air.
5. The allocation of emissions rights to existing players rewards dirty incumbents and disadvantages their cleaner and newer competitors. The role of government, almost the only real role in the anti-trust/competition area, should be to prevent incumbents from erecting barriers to entry, not to institute those barriers for them.
6. All carbon emissions have an equal impact and should be valued accordingly. Our incentives are upside down, and they are largely so because there is not a single carbon-price applying equally to large and small installations and to the fuelling of electricity, heat and transport. And the reason that we do not have such a simple, integrated pricing mechanism is largely because we fetishize a discredited cap-and-trade system that is not only wrong in principle and practice, but cannot practically be expanded to cover all sectors.
7. Even if cap-and-trade mechanisms like the EU-ETS could be broadened to cover all emissions sources from all locations and tightened to provide meaningful savings through tight and strongly-enforced targets, they would be the wrong approach:
   
   1. Cap-and-trade produces an irrational, discontinuous demand curve.
   2. All current cap-and-trade schemes focus only on gross emissions, and usually only from particular sources.
   3. They apply a positive price to non-carbon rather than a negative cost to carbon, which has unavoidable ramifications for the misvaluation of the contribution of various solutions.
   4. Cap-and-trade assumes that there is any rationale for an arbitrary cap. The balance between investing in adaptation and mitigation should not be decided for us by scientists, but discovered in markets that establish people's preferences and perceptions of the balance of risks.

There is no way of adapting cap-and-trade mechanisms to satisfy these objections. We should carry through with Phase 2 of the EU-ETS, because the market had a reasonable expectation that it would be implemented. But we should agree now to put it out of its misery after that, and to use the period before 2012 to negotiate an alternative system to replace Kyoto – one that provides a more rational price, reflecting all sources and sinks, and taking account of adaptation as well as mitigation, and that is agreeable to all nations, or at least all major emitters. There are alternatives, if Europeans are prepared to open their minds.

Anyway, the full paper follows below. You might want to make yourself a cup of tea before you set to work on this.

The Department for the environment, food and rural affairs (Defra) has got itself in a bit of pickle! It appears to have endorsed a view from a vegan group called Viva, that we should all become vegetarians to combat climate change. It is even considering recommending eating less meat as one of the "key environmental behaviour changes" needed to save the planet. The leaked email even says that this change would have to be introduced "gently" because of "the risk of alienating the public". Well, you've lost me for a start.

Big brother really is watching you. From a discrete plane fitted with military spy equipment. Unlike the Big Brother from Orwell's 1984 though, the version of Big Brother the local councils are producing is more of an intrusive, nagging, holier than thou mother in law. Incredibly, spy cameras are being used to monitor the energy efficiency of our homes. This information is then being put on a website, presumably so mobs of green nutters can come and throw stones at your window and sing songs about flowers and the sun gods.

As predicted, the Home Improvement Packs (HIPs) debate is rolling on and intensifying by the day. The Lords merits committee, chaired by Lord Filkin, published a report on the committee's findings, which concluded "We cannot but conclude that the government has not been able to convince the principal stakeholders in the housing market that their proposals as they now stand are worthwhile or sensible, or are likely to be effective for their declared purposes." In other words they are a complete waste of time and money.

I'm feeling rather pleased with a comment I posted to a thread on the Samizdata.net website, so I'm going to post it here too.

Jonathan Pearce had posted a thoughtful piece to Samizdata on the merits of David Cameron's announcement on rationing air travel, in the course of which he allowed that DC might genuinely have the interests of the poor at heart, but pointed out those interests were in the future, and asked "Why should a politician, answerable to an electorate, sacrifice or ask to sacrifice its interests for the interests of people in such a long time to come, and over a theory or set of theories that are, at best, not proven to the standards of a court of law?" Sounds like a good libertarian perspective, and many had agreed with him in more colourful language, accusing DC and his ilk of being fascists. Such exaggeration is often a good sign that people are thinking more with their guts than their heads, a habit discussed in my "Post-rational" post.

And so to the Government and their use of the environment as a way of screwing over the taxpayer. In an attempt to out-green Green Dave, the government has gone in a radically different direction. Instead of aiming to cut emissions by at least 60% by 2050, they are going to cut them by 60% by 2050. See the difference? And instead of reviewing the progress yearly as Cameron has suggested, they will review every five years. The Government claims that the five-year model is a more intelligent and flexible policy. Which may well be technically true, but it's not really saying much, is it? They have attacked the Tories for placing so much emphasis on aviation, yet their own policy review document published in January warns of the critical importance of cutting aviation emissions.

What is it with David Cameron? He is obsessed with taxation and the environment. Or is it he is obsessed with taxation and excuses for raising taxes whilst sounding like a kind and caring new Tory? Forget the comparisons with Tony Blair, Cameron is the new Gordon Brown (though slightly less dour) - or at least his old pal George Osborne is. The latest value (not policy) is to issue passengers with a 'green miles' allowance and forced to pay more if they took extra flights.

Good news from the Energy Saving Trust's website:

"A new carbon reduction method for diesel vehicles is set to be demonstrated on Ford's fleet of vehicles in the near future....To be trialed on Ford's Power Stroke diesel vehicles, the technology is hoped to reduce carbon emissions and increase engine torque."

Fantastic. But...

"Ford is set to unveil its 6.4-litre Power Stroke engine in its new F-Series pickup next year, which is set to be the company's cleanest ever diesel."

6.4 litres!!! If that's their idea of clean, I want to see what a really dirty Ford pickup looks like. Much like their current fleet, I suppose, which tells you how badly run and behind the times they have got.

I've got an idea. If you want to save energy and/or carbon, don't run a truck with a 6.4-litre engine.

Last night's Dispatches report on the Great Global Warming Swindle brought some welcome balance to the climate-change debate. Not because the programme itself was balanced - it was completely one-sided in favour of the sceptics - but because the other side of the argument (the alarmists) has been given almost all of the air-time for the past few years. We are constantly told by politicians, publicists and much of the media that there is scientific consensus, that the debate is over, and that it is somehow morally wrong to question the science. Well, there is clearly not consensus, the debate is not over, and suppressing debate is a whole lot more morally contemptible than trying to raise it (stand up and take a bow, all you Royal Society representatives, for your ignoble role in the effort to suppress debate).

Having said that, some climate-change sceptics are as inclined to grasp any evidence as complete refutation of global-warming theory, as the alarmists are inclined to interpret any data as further evidence to support their beliefs. So in the interests of balance, here is a link to the best-informed article I could find that provided counter-arguments to those in the programme.

The production of ethanol from corn as a replacement/supplement for petrol is coming under increased attack from environmentalists. This month's Ecologist and today's Independent both led with a destructive assessment of its merits.

I do not claim to know whether ethanol is a good or bad solution to our energy problems. But I do know that George Bush and Tony Blair don't know, and neither do Zac Goldsmith (editor of The Ecologist) and Simon Kelner (editor-in-chief of The Independent). Because they are trying to establish the case by claim, counter-claim and posturing, little light is shed on the issue. And because no mechanism exists that simply values carbon equally from all its sources, we have no way of discovering in a market the reality that is being obfuscated in discussion. As usual, sweeping generalisations ("this technology is good/bad regardless") that ignore changing circumstances are a good sign that people are busy picking losers rather than allowing the most efficient and appropriate solutions for the circumstances to emerge and evolve.

Sometimes the debates seem intended to confuse, not illuminate. Perhaps this is the real objective. For an alternative take on the ethanol debate in America and people's motivations in presenting their arguments, have a look at the What's That Smell? site. The author's hostility to a local development has produced a scathing analysis of the process by which politicians and lobbyists adopt and promote losers for their own interests. Just remember that the other side - opponents of ethanol - have their own agenda too.